1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and program for performing an impact analysis of program statements in at least one source code file.
2. Description of the Related Art
One of the challenges when editing code in a program is to understand the effect of changes to certain lines of code to other parts of the program. In the prior art, software developers use a debugging tool to “step” through the program and determine all the execution paths. Based on the information of the execution characteristics determined by “stepping” through the program, the developer can then analyze the execution path to determine the effect the proposed changes to certain statements may have on the current operation of the program including the program statements to change. This process is manually intensive and is based on the capabilities of the developer to properly observe all the effects the proposed changes will have on the execution characteristics.
Moreover, a change in one program may affect the operations of another external application by modifying the content of a shared resource, such as a global variable, memory, file, database record, etc. Currently there is no integrated approach for determining the effects of a proposed change to code on the operation of external applications. In fact, a debugger typically only is aware of the application currently executing, and not the effects on an external application.
In the current art, the software developer is often unable to ascertain the impact of code modifications to the application including the modified code and to external applications, until errors and bugs are detected. At such point, the developer may then have to spend considerable time tracking down the source of the problem to the code change that was made. This problem is further exasperated if the negative impact of a code change is realized in an external application, where the developer or system manager may be totally unaware of the changes made because they were made in a different application. In such case, time will be spent tracking the source of the error to another application, and then to a particular code change in the external application.
For these reasons, there is a need in the art for improved software development tools that assist developers in understanding the impact of modifications to a source program.